Hardly anybody watching this
summer’s Washington squabble over raising the national debt ceiling
considered it a heartening
demonstration of how government should work. Despite repeated
warnings and pleas from the business community and much of the
outside world, Republicans seemed willing to let the U.S.
government default for the first time in its history, while President
Obama seemed unable to make his case or find a strategy.

Even after the cliff’s-edge escape from disaster, the episode has considerably unnerved the country. Stock markets here and
abroad have been erratic in the subsequent month. Consumer confidence, measured by the University of Michigan, plunged 16
points, a drop that usually reflects major economic bad news. Other effects are less measurable, but equally toxic.

The vastly less important episode of scheduling the president’s speech to Congress on his new jobs proposal is unlikely to
ease that pessimism.

“If the objective of the White House and
Speaker Boehner was to demonstrate to the American people that they
have gotten the
message from the markets and from voters that our economic straits
are so dire that it is time to set petty politics aside,”
former Clinton official David Rothkopf told the Times, “they have
failed before they started.”

It seems we’re back where we were after the debt ceiling fiasco — which is not a good place to be.

President Obama will, in fact, now address Congress on Thursday, which apparently better fits the speaker’s schedule, and
gets the president out of the way of the Republican presidential debate. It does, however, put him in competition with the
opening of the National Football League season.

It’s probably not ideal for the president and Congress to try to compete with something Americans have reason to take seriously.